You Are Practicing Arpeggios Wrong
Everyone on the internet and every guitar teacher you ever met probably told you to practice arpeggios.
But I remember spending hours practicing arpeggios and not really being able to do anything with them. Being able to play them doesn’t mean that you get them to sound great in my solos. It feels like you might be wasting your time
Luckily that isn’t too difficult to fix, and I’ll show you 7 ways you can turn any arpeggio into a solid Jazz line! It is not super difficult, and really more about how you think about the arpeggios.
You can build all of this around a single exercise, because when you are starting out with Jazz then there is a right and a wrong way to practice arpeggios, and I would also suggest that you skip inversions for now but I will explain that later.
In Jazz, you mostly use arpeggios that are one octave, so it doesn’t really make a ton of sense to spend a lot of time practicing complete positions, instead, you will be more efficient practicing them in a scale position as diatonic arpeggios.
That is the way you will hear them used the most in Jazz solos, and it is also a way to connect them to the scale and the other notes that they work together with, it covers a lot of stuff you will need along the way. I learned this exercise from Barry Harris and that is one of the most practical things to get right in the beginning.
Diatonic Arpeggios:
The focus is on turning these arpeggios into music, and I will show you how you add phrasing, notes, and rhythm to them because that is how they become Jazz lines, but first let’s keep it really simple and just improvise with the arpeggio because that will teach you some other important things as well.
#1 Arpeggios Are Enough If You Do It Right
Let’s say you want to solo over a II V I in C major, so Dm7 G7 to Cmaj7.
You need those arpeggios to play a solo over the progression, and luckily you already practiced them in the exercise.
It is a II V I, so in C major, we need the arpeggio from the 2nd note of the scale: Dm7, then from the 5th that is a G7 and then you can do this Cmaj7.
Connect that to the music and practice that on the II V I:
The first thing to do is to practice soloing with this, just try to come up with some lines, use rhythm and maybe compose or play rubato, notice how I am really careful in getting from one chord to the next.
And then after some time, you develop better rhythmical ideas and melodies and you can start making lines like this:
This is great for nailing the changes and developing some solid rhythms in your playing, but let’s open up the arpeggio with a few extra notes, that’s where it starts to get really fun!
#2 The First Thing To Add
The exercise I gave you connects the arpeggios and the scale, so if we look at a Cmaj7 arpeggio:
You can add scale notes to the mix in between the notes in the arpeggio. That could give you a line like this.
The Arpeggio:
Which turns into a lick like this:
Or a descending version like this:
Super easy! Barely an inconvenience. It is mostly about seeing the notes around the arpeggio and using them to move to a note in the arpeggio.
In these two lines that is how I think about the notes: something around the arpeggio.
Let’s add some notes that are a bit more exciting!
#3 The Jazz Thing To Add
I am talking about adding chromatic passing notes since you already have the diatonic notes from the scale.
You can do a LOT of things with chromatic passing notes, and there are systems that help with that, but for now, essentially you can do whatever you want as long as you resolve it to a chord tone. That is what I am doing in this example, check this out:
and just mixing chromatic and diatonic notes with the arpeggio can already give you this:
Of course, when you practice this then work on composing lines and find things that you like the sound of. One thing that can make them sound more like Jazz is by having the high note of the phrase on an off-beat like you heard the B in the last example on the 1&.
There is a way to make it easier to do that in your Jazz lines, that is the next level, but keep in mind that you can actually go through this video and just pick one of the topics to explore, write some lines, and work on getting that into your playing. It doesn’t have to be in this order.
#4 Going Around The Chord Tones
Instead of adding a single note here and there then you can also add small melodies that move to a chord tone from above and below, these are called enclosures. Let me show you these and then we can add some rhythm to the arpeggios.
A simple example of an enclosure could be a diatonic note above and a chromatic note below which for Cmaj7 could be something like this:
Remember that you are still seeing the Cmaj7 in the scale as well, and now you can create something like this, and try to compare how far this is from just playing the arpeggio:
And it is incredibly simple to create solid vocabulary here is one with an enclosure around the root and around the 5th:
With these enclosures:
#5 The Mighty Triplet
There is one way of playing arpeggios that is pretty much instant Bebop. When you hear it I am sure you will recognize it:
So I am playing the arpeggio as an 8th-note triplet and I am adding a leading note before the arpeggio. Now check out how this sounds when you add a few enclosures:
Or this example which is one of George Benson’s favorite licks that he probably learned from Charlie Parker:
I said that inversions are not so useful for Jazz lines, let me show you what you can do instead, and then I’ll show you some phrasing tricks.
#6 The Melodic Inversion
Similar to the triplet, then this is really a great technique for making your lines sound better, and not be too predictable. I mentioned in the beginning of the video that Inversions are not that useful for Jazz, this is mostly from observing vocabulary of Bop and a lot of later stuff, where inversions are not that common in lines when it comes to 7th chord arpeggios. Triads are a different story, there are Triads inversions all over the place.
Instead, this is a much nicer option: The Pivot arpeggio.
What I am doing here is taking the arpeggio:
But I play the root and then move the rest an octave down, so you still get the same order of notes but the last part is moved down an octave:
Using this and a bit of chromatic magic will give you a great line like this:
With the pivot arpeggio here:
And you can of course use this on the higher octave as well and throw in an enclosure:
But one thing is changing the melody and the rhythm. You can also tweak how you play the notes on the instrument, the phrasing.
#7 It’s The Phrasing
Let’s start by sliding into a note, here it is the top note in the phrase:
You can add a slide later as well:
Another useful tool for phrasing is adding trills like this one:
Which sounds great like this:
Adding Chromatic Notes With Barry Harris’ system
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